Painting a figure in a space

Fen came around today to sit for me again. Fen sat and I worked, for nearly two hours,  into an old canvas I'd sanded down .  My goal was to take some of the learning from the drawing and apply it to the painting.  The canvas was square 40 x 40 cm and as I began laying out the space I seemed to forget everything I'd been thinking about.  The figure is dead centre.  I'd forgotten to use my charcoal. I hadn't tried Antony Wilson's trick of working up the background before the model arrived…I was simply too excited to be painting again to down tools and begin again when I thought about it.  I was also too excited to clean my brushes at the start either. Or to try Craig Jefferson's technique of multiple palettes. I did manage to paint the figure and the space around it together in a sort of uniform way. It will be interesting to see how I manage to keep this up when I won't see Fen for more than a week. So far I am bogged down by local colour.  Perhaps there is too much of it!

Finding my way in other's techniques

Fen - 65 x 46cm, pastel on paper

 Fully realising that I have never attempted to make portraits, I started this week by inviting a friend to sit for me.  I transformed a corner of the studio into a room and primed a large piece of Fabriano paper with a bubblegum pink. I drew Fen for two hours with pastel and then after she left, spent a few more hours working from the set up. This is not finished, but I think it represents an exploration of using the model to create a story, a likeness, something beyond simply a colour study.  I don't know where this will lead but I feel I need to explore some of the things I have learned over the last week.

Feven - 16.5 x 16.5, pastel on paper 

Feven - 13.5 x 20.5, pastel on altered book page

Today I did two small hour studies of Feven in pastel.  The first is in a square sketchbook.  The second is in my altered book.